How America Is Losing the Battle for the South China Sea

What a difference a year makes. In late summer 2016, there was some hope the July 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling in favor of the Philippine interpretation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea regarding the Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal would curtail Beijing’s subsequent activity in the South China Sea (despite China’s refusal to even participate in the arbitration case or recognize the court’s jurisdiction, let alone accept the ruling). In fact, some optimists, like Lynn Kuok from the National University of Singapore, have pointed to small developments—such as China this year permitting Filipino and Vietnamese fishing around Scarborough Shoal for the first time since 2012—as encouraging signs that the Hague’s ruling is having a positive effect. But most observers see it much differently, and developments this past summer seem to support a much more pessimistic forecast.

With the U.S. government and the world understandably focused on North Korea and escalating tensions in northeast Asia, China this summer has made substantial progress in further establishing de facto control over most of the South China Sea. Indeed, aside from Secretary Defense Mattis’ strongly-worded speech in June at the annual Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore, and an uptick in U.S. Navy freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea, the administration seems uninterested in reinforcing—let alone more forcefully emphasizing—international law and the longstanding U.S. position that all claimants must take concrete steps in accordance with said law to resolve the disputes peacefully. As Bonnie Glaser from the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted this past July at CSIS’s seventh annual South China Sea conference, the United States seemed surprised and ill-prepared for the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s 2016 ruling, and has yet to devise a comprehensive South China Sea policy or strategy. Freedom-of-navigation operations is simply a policy tool, not a policy in itself.

This isn’t lost on Beijing or the ten Association for Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) states. As the diplomatic winds blow harder in China’s favor, Beijing’s next move could very well be a security power play, like declaring maritime base points and strait baselines from the islands and shoals it has occupied and militarized. Or perhaps it could establish an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over the same area. Furthermore, U.S.-China relations are worsening over North Korea and trade, and, following the Nineteenth Party Congress in late October, Chinese president Xi Jinping may see, from a position of greater domestic strength, both an opportunity and a need to make that very type of play.

China scored two important victories this summer in the South China Sea confrontation, and this barely got any notice in mainstream Western media. First, after a hotly divided politburo debate in Hanoi in July, Vietnam yielded to a Chinese threat of force and suspended drilling in block 136/3, which is licensed to Vietnam’s state oil company, the Spanish firm Repsol S.A., and the Mubadala Development Company in the United Arab Emirates. China had first tried to pressure the Spanish government, as Repsol S.A. provided the drilling vessel and started the onsite project in June. When that didn’t work, Chinese Gen. Fan Changlong, deputy chair of China’s Central Military Commission, explicitly threatened force if Vietnam did not cease the project (block 136/3 is inside China’s South China Sea maritime rights claim, or the Nine-Dash Line) while on an annual border-exchange visit to Vietnam. Let’s be clear on just what exactly happened: Vietnam began a legal resource extraction operation inside its exclusive economic zone, and China, opposing it on dubious historical and legal grounds (grounds that the Hague’s PCA firmly rejected), threatened war if they didn’t cease the project. Beijing didn’t threaten to take Vietnam to court in the Hague, or raise the matter before the United Nations in another forum, or try to apply greater diplomatic and economic pressure. The Chinese government instead threatened military action. And Vietnam took the threat seriously and complied. And the United States and the rest of the world essentially registered no serious rebuke.